The Moon's
by Losselen
Summary: It's the same story that's been told over and over, but who's real and who's the ghost? (Remus x Sirius)


**The Moon's**

Here are your lives, here are the barren men with unfilled eyes and empty lips. Men who speak of melancholy with words of bitterness, whose fingers are made of water and body is a black sachet for the soul. 

You slowly slump onto the floor with a dull thud of the fallen wand. It is raining out side and your eyes are misty; then again, you don't want to see, you can't stand seeing him sitting there. 

Surely the rain is crueler than anything else, surely water can kill like nothing can. Hollowing the lung and the soul with airless and colorless bubbles. Surely, surely it is in his downcast eyes and pursed mouth and chapped lips and precise fingers, that same fear you know so well. But how can it be the same fear if it is _his_ and not yours — _does he even fear?_ He turns away his gaze in leisure manners and you aren't sure; his eyes are sad and diverted and you are lost between what is the same and what is different. 

His eyes flash at you and you can't read anything there. People obsess over eyes like his all their lives without ever remembering that eyes are only eyes — lost within the reflecting valleys and glassy rivers — no emotion conveyed and nothing said. 

The cornice of the desk is hard and wooden as you rest your head against it, the flooring is cold. The hand stroking your cock feels like your own in its familiar texture and movement. It teases in the way it lingers over the flesh but never fully touching, making you itchy and hot. The hand moves faster now, harder and no longer teasing. Building up tension and senses in its erratic movement, touching and stroking and — you don't even care. _damn it faster harder faster don't stop_ Is it your hand or is it his? Or is it something much more softer and wetter and gentler like the mouth of someone? Shouldn't you open your eyes and see? _I don't care I don't care just move faster and let me come…_

You had a lover once, you can only vaguely remember. It's ludicrous that you can't even remember such an important thing — can't remember if he loved you or not — can't remember whether you loved him back — or were you even lovers at all? Did you not share the same velvet bed whenever you thought James and Peter weren't listening, did you not kiss him by the summer train that ventured back to the buzzes of London? Or is it all in your head these echoes of fragmented dreams, all these being just the aftertaste of lust; it could have been, certainly. You remember wanting him, needing him, but never of him returning anything and _certainly_ not of love — but after all these years how can you remember anything at all is a mystery. Surely you went insane for a while if not for all these years, surely you can't trust these devious memories. And really, what _are_ you supposed to say or ask? "By the way I was wondering, did you ever love me? Do you still do?" No, that'd be too overt and brazen and awkward. 

You're almost there. Almost there. Almost but not quite, close and much too close to see and feel it. 

So when exactly did you fall in love with a ghost? — like those young and foolish Chinese scholars did millennia ago — Charmed and captured and far too nostalgic to do anything else. He is like alcohol, though, sweet nepenthe erasing the sorrows when his mouth covers ours completely. _What would be the harm in one kiss?_ You ask yourself as you slowly forget that his lips and hands are colder than yours. 

Besides, you've already taught yourself well in the art of deception — play the repetition games with these memes long enough and you'll start to believe. People lie this all the time. Fabricated fantasies are more dependable than the truth sometimes. 

You come shamefully over the somber floor. 

~

You wonder today, what he would think if he knows about the ghost. They have the same eyes, you conjure up the images and notice, the same brows and lean, sturdy fingers. In fact, they're the same person. _No, no, they can't be, how can two be of the same?_ No, one is the ghost and one is the real and you forget the difference sometimes — they're both cold. 

You sometimes don't know if he even cares; he might even hate you — _or maybe or maybe we were never lovers at all_ — because he pretends like nothing had happened in his perfectly deceitful world and you even go along with it sometimes. 

But with _him_ you don't have to pretend, certainly not. Although his fingertips are chilling and his gaze is endless, you can just imagine the warmth now, the pounding passion and resonation of rain sounds, zooming into and through you and leaving your breath uncaught and blood boiling. The pure fucking pride of the past making you think that you are dreaming; the ghost's hands hovering over you, making you freeze. But when you are fully thawed, you go back to his silent pretense again and believe that nothing has never existed. _he is the sane one he is the one who remembers he is the one who is right_ But why are you regretful, then, if all this is true and your mouth has never sealed his? Surely, surely there must be some kind of memory behind this bone-grinding protest. Surely. 

_He_ stands there, no longer stoic but laughing. Cold, chilling, repetitive sounds. Hands glide past your arms — along the reflecting lines of metal — along the thin, muted jaw line. Slowly and seductively drawing tears out of you, easing your warm body into a frozen, unmoving thing. But why would you ever care that he isn't real? No, he _is_ real, just that he isn't — 

Your eyes spring open and the hand is gone. 

Maybe it is only in the isogamy of two souls that Elysium comes. 

Maybe existence is just not as solid a thing as you think. 

~ 

His gaze meets yours steadily across the empty room, with charming smile tucked away just underneath the carefully folded hands. Fingers weaving into a web that efficiently hides his persuasive and hideous smirk. Water pours down outside and pounds the window, and this ghost looks at you with unblinking eyes. He never says a word except for the leering laugh and the creepy smile, just like how the real him has never really talks to you about anything important after the reunion. _He must know I'm crazy._ He never loved you. 

Yes. It is the moon he loves and hates in the end, not you. He's the moon's — you say that over and over again because it sounds so good to the tongue — the moon's. The moon's, not yours, the moon's. _Chang'er flew away on white silk floating, to the moon under the bay tree there, and dwelt forever as the Moon Spirit._

But in your dreams he is yours, like once he was or wasn't. 

He hums some darkly disgusting sort of forgotten tune under his tongue, making your hands shaky as you hold the quill. Splatters of ink stain your fingers as well as the purple vellum — _Charlemagne used purple vellum. Didn't he? _— and you're still writing. Funny how the motion of writing is so regular, the quill dipping in and drawing out and funny how everything you've just written makes no sense. Ink stained fingers logging every fucking word that comes into your mind, those flowing nonsense of the dream you just had. He is standing over your shoulders, you can just see him now — 

_He is standing over a cliff. Just standing there, standing over a shady edge of oblivion and the rim of the ground. And for a long moment he does nothing — not even blink — does nothing but stand with forlorn eyes and coldness rushing at his chest. He is standing standing standing. Whether he sees, he does not even know — what he sees, might even be colorless. But he does not see the knotted mass of interlacing clouds or the waving ocean, no he does not. All he sees that moment, all that fill his black eyes in that precise flash of pale moonlight — is himself standing. Standing over and standing above. Right on the cornice of the cliff that overhung the sea, high above and sky-touching. He sees he sees he sees seeing it all he sees. The next second, the crisp sound of breaking of rock reaches his ears, and it is only with an electric pulse of the nerve that —_

_Remus falls._

The nib breaks. 

And you break too. 


End file.
